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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Servo Folk. It’s one of the actions by Mitchell Baker that I disapproved of. Remember that the Rust programming language came out of Mozilla, right? It was being designed to create a fast and secure web engine by a related team. This Web Engine was of course Servo, written in Rust. Mozilla than took parts of their work and incorporated it into the Gecko web engine that runs Firefox, which was the Quantum Update. That’s where you saw the major speed up in Firefox to catch up to and beat Blink in many cases. Mitchell Baker a couple of years later made a move to lay off the Rust and Servo folk and spin out those projects so that they wouldn’t be Mozilla’s problem anymore, discontinuing their funding. She then proceeded to give herself a huge raise all while Mozilla’s market share had fallen to ~3%. It ticked me off needless to say.

    Have you heard of Electron? It’s the use of Chromium’s Blink web engine to run web apps as individual programs. Applications like Signal, Ferdi, Atom text editor, VS Code (the most popular IDE for developers) all use electron. I asked myself for years why isn’t there a Gecko equivalent of Electron? The answer is that Gecko’s way too old and janky (cobbled together over decades since the Netscape Navigator days), making it too difficult to work with. But the Servo project, being a completely fresh web engine written in Rust, is looking to play that role as its immediate functional goal. It’s a smaller, more attainable goal before it becomes a full fledged web engine that competes with the likes of Gecko, Blink, and Webkit (Safari and also what Blink’s based off of) to run a full fledged browser. The Servo project was out in the wilderness for a while before coming back to life in 2023.

    https://servo.org/


  • I want them to be a place where we can pull together like minded individuals of Lemmy and perhaps the Fediverse/ActivityPub together about a cause we care about and want to create a movement for. I figure c/movement will be were you can gather those folks c/organize is where you can have discussions and organize to take action. Perhaps there should be an associated matrix or discord channel for the second one.

    I’d like both communities to be community owned and community-led. So on big decisions and deciding the guidelines, I’d like the community to call the shots while mods would do the heavy lifting of enforcing those guidelines and organizing things to where the community’s voice can be heard (so for example, after having a discussion about guidelines, consolidating all of that into some sort of vote if there needed to be one on finally voting in the new guidelines).

    And the thing is we all have jobs, classes, family or something else entirely having claims to our attention and time, but we shouldn’t give up or give in. Let’s still figure out a way to persevere.





  • Those complaint websites are tailored to the customers who suffer from the decline in competition. We are suffering from Google using its market position to kill our user experience and options. As I understand, it’s classic monopoly abuse.

    In the 20th century, the US broke up the Hollywood model where companies owned both the studios and the theaters (how you have 20th century Fox (or just 20th century now) and Fox theaters). Google owning 75% online advertising and 75% of web browser share is a clear conflict of interest and you can see it from how they’re pushing things like Manifest V3 via their browser (especially when you consider how Chrome is the default browser on their phones), now that it’s the only browser that developers are increasingly starting to support.

    If you follow that model, one thing that’s going to have to be done is to have Chrome/Chromium browser development be broken away from Google proper. Google can’t fund the developers any longer.



  • Look, if Lemmy, NPR, and PBS can happen, then it’s always possible to fork Firefox (or throw more weight behind the Servo folk who are moving towards developing the Rust web engine towards embedded applications to get it up to speed faster for general web browsing) if Mitchell Baker and search revenue approach to funding Firefox is getting in the way of having a fast, private, and secure browser for everybody.

    But enough woah is me and our obstacles are overwhelming on here. In this case, if we do nothing, we get nothing. Especially if you’re right that the Mitchell Bakers of the world are not behind us. I know we at least have an ally in the EFF.